Needed for Standalone: Animated Werebeast

[Diego]

I'd like to encourage Mr Lemon to invest on the werebeast. He seems more enthusiastic about doing something from scratch and I'm not really working day and night on it. My last update is a mere change of proportions:

 

 

(my tablet ran out of batteries a few days ago and I can only remember that when I sit down to work)

 

I intend to keep working on it though.

 

It's worth noticing that not many people will be willing to work from existing assets, like heads or rigs. Not because of creativity incentive or anything like that, but because it's a lot more work, as unintuitive as that may sound. It brings a broken and unpredictable workflow of importing, understanding how the existing things function and then working around it.

[Springheel]

It's worth noticing that not many people will be willing to work from existing assets, like heads or rigs.

 

Yes, I'm aware that it's more awkward. However, if we want to go standalone, it has to be done.

 

 

So you have a current rig for your humanoid characters? are you wanting the skeleton to fit into this rig, or do you want a rig that behaves the same way. I could probably do those animations. I'm sorta less keen to fit a character to a rig If I can help it.

 

Well, if you wanted to make the skeleton, I could fit it the rig myself.

[Mr Lemony Fresh]

Alright, I guess I'll do that then. Probably better that way.

[Mr Lemony Fresh]

By the way, diego, thanks for considering me but I'd prefer not to step on your toes with the werebeast as I'm sure you've been working hard to get it done.

[zergrush]

Considering all we really need is a body to fit the current head on, have you guys thought about adapting some other model the same way you adapted the imp body? I found this one on open game art (CC-BY licensed) which might be a suitable with some simple modifications.

 

http://opengameart.org/content/demon

[Springheel]

The most difficult part isn't the model, it's the rigging and animating. Still, I'll take a look at that guy; thanks.

[Diego]

I'm starting the animation work and I need some directions. What's the most convenient way to make the animations, for exporting later? Do I make all the animations in a single scene like idle is the animation within frames 0 to 130, walk is within 131 and 200 etc? or a single scene for each animation? I don't know how the exporting process works so I need to know that beforehand.

[Springheel]

I make each animation it's own scene. I'm not sure if it's possible to export only certain frames. What software are you using for the animations?

[Diego]

I like it better this way, I can use different rigs! I want IK for the arms only when animating the quadruped set.

I'm using Max. I'm learning to really dislike this software, for so many reasons, but these softwares require so much time to learn that I'm kinda of stuck with it.

[Diego]

A couple more questions:

 

1) How does D3 handles transitions between animations? Does it smoothly interpolates between whatever's playing and the next one?

 

2) walk cycles. How are these handled by the engine? I recall something about root animation, so characters should be animated moving forward. Is this right?

[Diego]

ok, made the first animation. I'm not going to make previews for all, but since this is the first I've done I thought it would be interesting to show what it will look like when it's done. I'm not a great animator but I hope this will work well enough.

 

(also: I added hair!!)

 

http://youtu.be/vhyVIQTAPhU

[zergrush]

That is looking very sweet. Quite natural-looking.

[Bikerdude]

Very Impressive Diego!, Im convinced :-D

[Springheel]

1) How does D3 handles transitions between animations? Does it smoothly interpolates between whatever's playing and the next one?

 

Theoretically yes, but I find that the blending between frames is really unreliable.

 

walk cycles. How are these handled by the engine? I recall something about root animation, so characters should be animated moving forward. Is this right?

 

Yes, the key is to make sure the origin bone moves. The origin bone determines the actual motion of the AI.

 

Love the look of the werebeast. The idle animation is good, but the cyle is a little fast for a default idle...the hand movements become quite repetitive. Or is this an individual idle animation, like coughing, that will be played randomly?

[Diego]

The idle animation is good, but the cyle is a little fast for a default idle...the hand movements become quite repetitive.

 

I noticed that too. It's less than 100 frames. I could remove that extra movement from the arm to make it less perceivable, but I think it's easy enough to make the animation longer and it will look better.

[Springheel]

Our humanoid idle is 145 frames, and the more dramatic idle_drunk one is 270.

[RPGista]

Hey, how come did I miss this post?! Impressive work... It really is becoming quite a unique character.

[Diego]

Glad you like it I made some improvements to that animation, it's twice as long and there are no perceivable repetitive movements now (I hope). There are 2 animations and I'm moving to the walk cycle now.

 

My fear is that I'm doing something wrong that the engine doesn't like and all the animations will be wasted. I was wondering if anyone wants to test at least the idle animation in-game. I tried to export to md5 and visualize it with the md5 model viewer to no avail, I don't know if the problem is in the viewer or in the export/model process.

[Springheel]

I'd love to test it in game. I doubt I can export it, but I can try the md5 you've already created.

[Diego]

I'm trying two different exporters. One throws an unknown exception and points me to a line of code from the script that doesn't mean anything to me, and the other crashes the whole thing. Not promising!

[Springheel]

What software are you using to export?

[SeriousToni]

One throws an unknown exception and points me to a line of code from the script that doesn't mean anything to me

 

I had this too. Your model needs to be an editable mesh with a skin modifier on top of it (nothing more)

[Diego]

It is. Can you think of anything else that might be causing trouble? if you know of a safest way through another software I'm pretty sure I can export it using FBX.

[Springheel]

Which software is it? Max?

[SeriousToni]

I only use 3ds Max too, so I have the same problems. As far as I recall I had this error only when not exporting it as mesh with skin mod on it. It even lasted after I had changed finally to mesh (so I needed to save, and restart 3ds Max). So I think that this script will just stop when something happens, that it was not programmed for (the script line where it pointed to didn't help me out anyways) so try to follow the text in the readme, that describes how to use it. Maybe there's some simple little thing that you forgot?

 

Are you using Max 2013?